Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse (vice.com) 135
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: For much of the 21st century, software engineering has been seen as one of the safest havens in the tenuous and ever-changing American job market. But there are a growing number of signs that the field is starting to become a little less secure and comfortable, due to an industry-wide downturn and the looming threat of artificial intelligence that is spurring growing competition for software jobs. "The amount of competition is insane," said Joe Forzano, an unemployed software engineer who has worked at the mental health startup Alma and private equity giant Blackstone. Since he lost his job in March, Forzano has applied to over 250 jobs. In six cases, he went through the "full interview gauntlet," which included between six and eight interviews each, before learning he had been passed over. "It has been very, very rough," he told Motherboard.
Forzano is not alone in his pessimism, according to a December survey of 9,338 software engineers performed on behalf of Motherboard by Blind, an online anonymous platform for verified employees. In the poll, nearly nine in 10 surveyed software engineers said it is more difficult to get a job now than it was before the pandemic, with 66 percent saying it was "much harder." Nearly 80 percent of respondents said the job market has even become more competitive over the last year. Only 6 percent of the software engineers were "extremely confident" they could find another job with the same total compensation if they lost their job today while 32 percent said they were "not at all confident."
Over 2022 and 2023, the tech sector incurred more than 400,000 layoffs, according to the tracking site Layoffs.fyi. But up until recently, it seemed software engineers were more often spared compared to their co-workers in non-technical fields. One analysis found tech companies cut their recruiting teams by 50 percent, compared to only 10 percent of their engineering departments. At Salesforce, engineers were four times less likely to lose their jobs than those in marketing and sales, which Bloomberg has said is a trend replicated at other tech companies such as Dell and Zoom. But signs of dread among software engineers have started to become more common online. In December, one Amazon employee wrote a long post on the anonymous employee platform Blind saying that the "job market is terrible" and that he was struggling to get interviews of any sort. "In the age of AI, computer science is no longer the safe major," Kelli Maria Korducki wrote in The Atlantic in September. AI programs like ChatGPT and Google Bard allow users to write code using natural language, greatly reducing the time it takes workers to complete coding tasks. It could lead to less job security and lower compensation for all but the very best in the software trade, warns Matt Welsh, a former computer science professor at Harvard.
"More than 60 percent of those surveyed said they believed their company would hire fewer people because of AI moving forward," reports Motherboard.
Forzano is not alone in his pessimism, according to a December survey of 9,338 software engineers performed on behalf of Motherboard by Blind, an online anonymous platform for verified employees. In the poll, nearly nine in 10 surveyed software engineers said it is more difficult to get a job now than it was before the pandemic, with 66 percent saying it was "much harder." Nearly 80 percent of respondents said the job market has even become more competitive over the last year. Only 6 percent of the software engineers were "extremely confident" they could find another job with the same total compensation if they lost their job today while 32 percent said they were "not at all confident."
Over 2022 and 2023, the tech sector incurred more than 400,000 layoffs, according to the tracking site Layoffs.fyi. But up until recently, it seemed software engineers were more often spared compared to their co-workers in non-technical fields. One analysis found tech companies cut their recruiting teams by 50 percent, compared to only 10 percent of their engineering departments. At Salesforce, engineers were four times less likely to lose their jobs than those in marketing and sales, which Bloomberg has said is a trend replicated at other tech companies such as Dell and Zoom. But signs of dread among software engineers have started to become more common online. In December, one Amazon employee wrote a long post on the anonymous employee platform Blind saying that the "job market is terrible" and that he was struggling to get interviews of any sort. "In the age of AI, computer science is no longer the safe major," Kelli Maria Korducki wrote in The Atlantic in September. AI programs like ChatGPT and Google Bard allow users to write code using natural language, greatly reducing the time it takes workers to complete coding tasks. It could lead to less job security and lower compensation for all but the very best in the software trade, warns Matt Welsh, a former computer science professor at Harvard.
"More than 60 percent of those surveyed said they believed their company would hire fewer people because of AI moving forward," reports Motherboard.
Try Data Engineering (Score:5, Interesting)
Very similar skill set, so picking it up is not a actually difficult but new learnings are required. The demand is higher now than software engineering and thus far harder to automate.
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I did this in 2020, landing a job as a SQL engineer, though I had worked my entire career using languages like C# and C++. The mindset is a little different, set theory works differently from the procedural coding practices of other languages. But the overall skillsets are similar.
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You sound like a smart person. You'll be fine anyway. It's the low hanging fruit who will suffer.
fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
chatgpt and similar at best write mediocre and buggy code that also doesn't consider edge cases. It is no threat to a professional developer. It gets worse trying to either solve or code for problems needing mathematical modeling including science problems. There are hilarious youtube videos of all that floundering our supposedly best ai systems do.
Re:fallacy (Score:5, Informative)
I've recently started using ChatGPT to write simple scripts for me. Stuff that I don't do that often and will probably have to look up syntax and command names, etc. It has yet to fail on turning out exactly what I asked for in less time than it took me to type out the query - and I'm a fast typist.
I doubt it's going to generate source code for an office suite any time soon, but the basic stuff is nailed down as far as I can tell.
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you sure you don't have bad edge case bugs?
I see chatgpt scrits that take port numbers and only check if its integer with 0-9's in it, not the actual valid range of ports that can be used in tcp/ip... and even port 0 is a non-routable no-no.
I've seen script that did privileged things but only allowed uid with 0 (root) to run it, which as any unix/linux admin will tell you is laughable, there are other ways the privileged things will be allowed and can be done when running as another user.
The scripts
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They're just simple PowerShell and bash scripts, simple enough to sight-read in a few seconds. Honestly, no issues. ...but maybe I'm asking for stuff that had millions of correct examples in the training data. Like I said, simple stuff.
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this kind of defeats your previous statement. if it's so simple then it's easier and faster to write than to write a query and then copypaste a result into an editor. if you have problem remembering the syntax then you won't be able to "sight-check" it at a glance either, so you basically are running a script being unsure how it will behave. good luck with that.
don't get me wrong, i've played around myself a bit and it is very impressive indeed. an extremely useful tool with proper verification. trustable w
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I'm using one of the AI assistants in the IDE that I use to develop software and it is pretty good at code completion. Simple loops and various fairly obvious code I am writing can get autocompleted entirely at times (if I accept it). I can ask it questions that would normally require a web search and it answers pretty accurately. Super convenient at times but I still have to write most of the code.
But I am skeptical that this is making programmers so much more productive all of a sudden that 100's of thous
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I do agree that AI isn't solving everything you want and what really worries me is that the AI can introduce exploitable bugs that can appear across many completely different software platforms that are completely unrelated.
Today you might get bugs from a certain known package but when a programmer takes help from an AI there's no traceability at all on where the code came from.
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AI can introduce exploitable bugs that can appear across many completely different software platforms
I think it happened with stackoverflow. Most of the training data probably come from this site anyway, I'm not sure LLM are significantly more at risk than a google search. Maybe AI is a little bit worth because users see only one answer usually.
Re:fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
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chatgpt and similar at best write mediocre and buggy code that also doesn't consider edge cases. It is no threat to a professional developer.
Not today. It will be years, not decades, before it is though.
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That's actually not the problem from job market perspective.
It won't turn random people into competent developers, but it can turn them into low skilled ones. And it can also make good developers more productive. While it is generally a good thing, it can be bad news for some developers, especially juniors, who are need to build skills and may not be offered an opportunity to do that, and those who don't know how to work with AI tools productively.
Still not there yet, but it may be happening. As for the cur
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I have a person turn in SQL on distance calculations using the haversine formula that ChatGPT recommended. It's not a wrong answer, but DBs come with geospatial scalars for exactly this purpose that engage optimization within the CPU (ie AVX). There's other things I've seen where folks submitted things that needed commitment control being ran atomic. Again, none of it was "wrong" per se, but it wasn't quite right.
So it produces mostly right, but bigger picture stuff, I don't see it handling just yet. It
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There is a finite amount of work that needs to be done, and AI makes people a lot more efficient at doing that work. AI doesn't have to replace Alice to put her out of a job. It just needs to free up enough of Bob's time that he can cover the difference if they fire her.
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Re: fallacy (Score:2)
No sympathy (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are talented, there are plenty of job offers out there. If you are mediocre, there are still job opportunities -they just aren't exciting. If you are poor at your job, find a new line of work.
If you have been working as a coder, you have been making good money. Hopefully you have been smart about saving it, and living a modest lifestyle.
Re:No sympathy (Score:5, Insightful)
PS. I took this advice 15 years ago and got out. Contracted my services (independent) for a few years. It got old, constantly planning for my next gig. So I switched to running a small retail business. It was not an easy transition.
Change is not easy. But if you feel stuck, change may be the right thing to do.
No sympathy indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have been working as a coder, you have been making good money. Hopefully you have been smart about saving it, and living a modest lifestyle.
Perhaps we should first understand that this simple advice, applies to basically every human job.
Unfortunately, modestly isn't very popular in a world that rewards narcissism.
Re:No sympathy indeed. (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps we should first understand that this simple advice, applies to basically every human job.
Sure, except a lot of people have no actual choice but to live a modest lifestyle, and saving is not actually possible, so yes good simple advice for western white collar human jobs, but the rest of this big world not so much.
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Indeed. On the other hand, it is very nice when you can just quit a bad job and do not have to find something new in short order.
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Unfortunately, modestly isn't very popular in a world that rewards narcissism.
My newest car is 20 years old this year and my oldest is 32. Who can afford to be anything other than modest?
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Sure. In the most productive era of human history, let's establish an ethic that people are supposed to live meager, precarious lives so a few billionaires can have everything.
That's not actually what happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you bring a skill set that is so rare your boss doesn't have any other options then he's always thinking in the back of his mind how he can replace you with somebody cheaper. Quality does not matter to businesses and hasn't for a very long time. We stopped and forcing antitrust law about four decades ago meaning companies don't have to compete and virtually all competition is Just an illusion because if you look at who the major shareholders are and who's sitting on the boards of directors it's the same handful of owners.
Take away competition and I don't need to compete on quality anymore I just need to undercut you briefly or just buy you out. And with zero antitrust law enforcement and virtually unlimited free money from the Federal reserve for the wealthy and well-connected (but not of course for you and me) I can for example haul off and spend $70 billion dollars buying one of the largest pillars of the gaming industry....
Stop asking for who the Bell tolls, it's tolling for you
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What actually happens is if you're talented or mediocre the people underneath you on that hierarchy are forced to work harder and they end up competing with you lowering your wages.
That's totally incoherent. Mediocre people don't compete well with me. They generate mediocre (or worse) output and take a longer time to do it. Putting in more hours doesn't help them unless they're much better than mediocre. That's because "stuff that should be done" is not a fixed supply, and employment is not a zero-sum pursuit. The better my coworkers and I are, the more work there is.
Unless you bring a skill set that is so rare your boss doesn't have any other options then he's always thinking in the back of his mind how he can replace you with somebody cheaper.
Nope. The boss wants to replace cogs in a machine with something cheaper. "Unique" resources inspire some mix of
You're thinking like a Rockstar programmer (Score:2)
So they purposefully structure their businesses to minimize your contributions and maximize what those mediocre programmers do.
And here's the rub: They're in charge of you. Whether you own your own consultancy gig or work for a sma
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Yawn. I've never been in a workplace like you describe. You ALWAYS pull that kind of shit out of your ass, and you -- like the tiredly wrong Marxist fiction you keep posting -- are worth exactly that: shit.
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You're either a liar or an idiot.
#1 place I can think of where I worked was Ameritech, a Baby Bell (go look it up). I was employee #188 in a start-up division that was going to be Ameritech's entry in the long-distance sweepstakes (something you're too young to know about). In one year, we grew from four teams to 27. About two years after I started, and spending three quarters of a BILLION DOLLARS, they shut it down.
And most of the programmers were contractors. Right out of college. Cheaper than experienced
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You had a sucky job once, and that makes me a liar?
As far as liars go, you're a spectacularly idiotic one.
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One "sucky" job? And you have no idea how big Ameritech was.
And then there was the Scummy Mortgage Co in Austin, TX, a fortune 500 company (and before I left, turnover was about 15%. A MONTH.)
And then there's the stories from others.
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Indeed. From observable evidence, there are a lot of people writing software that really have no business to do so.
The time honored classic on this phenomenon is still this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/... [codinghorror.com]
It makes it pretty clear why some people go through 100's of interviews and get no offers.
Re: No sympathy (Score:2)
My conclusion from past 2 years is that competition has indeed gotten worse. Juniors coming out of school are downright incompetent even as general nerds! Whats a netmask? Why would a developer need to know? How does http work?? Why would a developer need to know how threads work etc, how to pull something else than the lates out of a git branch.
Worst of all for them they don't even know how to learn! They're completely screwed.
Oh well (Score:5, Funny)
Such is life. Guess they'll have to learn a new trade like all those factory workers. Maybe take up coding.
Oh wait.
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If you've been in software development in the past two decades, and you haven't been constantly reinventing yourself, you are definitely on your way to obsolescence. Now is no different. Right now there's a huge sucking sound of companies posting AI jobs. But they'll figure out soon that not every problem can be solved by AI.
Re: Oh well (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Oh well (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine any other profession where you had to put in a day or two a week unpaid, just to keep up!
You mean such as attorneys, bankers, tax accountants, mechanical engineers, or pilots?
Re: Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
Or teachers or doctors or leaders of any kind, or pretty much any kind of job that requires a brain and pays well (with the exception of teachers, a job which doesn't pay so well).
Re: Oh well (Score:2)
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I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I would expect that materials do change some. Regulations probably change more though.
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Imagine other professions that clearly didn't properly unionize.
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They have AI to do that for them.
I hope that warms your heart as much as it warms mine.
XD
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The companies that are doing that, were already using automation before AI came around. You probably don't want to work for those companies anyway.
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Yep, pretty much spot-on.
Ain't no guarantees in life, 'cept death & tax (Score:2)
> "In the age of AI, computer science is no longer the safe major,"
There is NO safe major. Never assume good times will last forever, build up a rainy day fund.
I've been thru two IT slumps myself: the 1982-ish aerospace collapse, and the 2001-ish dot-com bust. I managed to avoid getting laid off on the first, but struggled on the second as CA was flooded with unemployed web devs. I survived by taking out-of-state contracts on legacy tools, things new web-devs didn't know.
Older colleagues remembered the 1
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Actually there is: Mathematics. Mathematicians _never_ had bad job opportunities ever. Obviously, they do not hand out Math degrees to mediocre people either.
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Computer science is -never- a safe major. Every business has been trying to get rid of computer programmers since the IBM mainframe days, either by outsourcing, offshoring, use of LLMs. In fact, CS majors are mocked as "nerds" and considered at best, a nusiance that can be replaced by the "dedicated, world class geniuses, the best the world has to offer, all concentrated into two cities, Bangalore or Hyderabad."
I have a CS degree. Would I get it again? Probably not. Given a choice, I probably would hav
FFS AI can't even do auto-complete right (Score:2)
time to go union! (Score:5, Interesting)
time to go union!
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Your way of life is subsidized by the tax base, which most of the people subsidizing your gravy train will never see such stuff because most places have gutted or done away with pensions. Wonderful.
And you think that is good? IMO all jobs should have a decent pension plan. I'd prefer to pull everyone up rather than drag everyone down. That you have not managed to make every job shitty yet is a good thing. I'm sure you will keep working on it though.
Not all jobs created equal (Score:5, Insightful)
Loads of "software engineering" jobs are little more than churning out boilerplate templates or code that is unfit for use in any mission critical system. Is AI coming for some of those jobs? You bet'cha! Good luck remaining employed as a full-time hack churning out Wordpress sites when there's about to be an AI that can walk someone through the whole process of building a tailored site in just a few minutes.
Repetition Rant [Re:Not all jobs created equal] (Score:5, Interesting)
> churning out boilerplate templates or code that is unfit for use in any mission critical system.
I don't get the reliance on boilerplates with all these frameworks. Why can't they factor it so one only supplies attributes that are different from the conventions rather than use mass replication? It's a bigly DRY violation. One could then use the power of set-theory and SQL to do most the grunt work: "Inherent" what's the same and only supply the delta's.
If you need programmed (computed) changes to attributes, then use events to change the right attribute at the right stage/level. Make the IDE built around event management, and make it easy to search, sort, and filter what events one is looking at using SQL so one doesn't have to re-invent "finding shit" in the IDE. It would be more like a data browser than an IDE so that it's cross-language and easy to pick up (if you know common SQL, but it would have simple forms for simple event searches.)
I've been working on such a framework myself as proof of concept, but found nobody else is interested in CRUD parsimony/factoring in general to help. They all want to play with the latest buzzwords instead of perfecting the basics of CRUD. It's like plumbing (pipes): boring, but the world depends on it. So let's do it better. CRUD runs the world even if not sexy.
CRUD principles haven't really changed much since the invention of relational databases, it's mostly the UI delivery platform that changes, but it's still forms, fields, grid listings, query-by-example, ERD's, etc. If you claim it has changed, please describe.
We don't have to "separate" UI from common CRUD idioms, as is the current (failed) trend, but rather manage them better. "Separating" would just be a WHERE clause filter, not file tree path. Separation would be virtual and situational. File trees hardwire separations that shouldn't be hardwired. Maybe in a giant team such is necessary, but not all apps need web-scale/enterprise shit. Program to size of need, not ego.
The only "true" CRUD innovation I've seen since the early 80's is partial matching, also known as auto-complete in drop-down lists. But that's mostly due to more powerful hardware rather than a conceptual improvement.
Don't fear the new - Embrace it (Score:5, Insightful)
I get it, change is scary, but if you do like the rest of the plebs, ya gonna lose out.
What I mean by this is, stop buying into the fearmongering, we got A.i. sure, but it's only a tool, it won't take your job, but what it will do is to separate the men from the mice.
Hear me out...
It's a tool, if you're smart - you'll take advantage of that tool, it's great for searching your code and finding the small flaws you didn't have time to figure out, if you learn the tool and use it as a sort of "assistant" in your daily job, swallow your pride and confusion, and learn what it can do for YOU, then you're already ahead of the curve.
I've used it extensively in my job, and I'm not even a half decent coder, but I have a coding mindset, meaning I can write basic code, and I'm in my 50s and grew up with the 8-bit generation, but the thing is - I never grew "old" in my mindset. Because of that I even got hired at the age of 50+ in the top corps, why? Because I embrace new, take advantage of it, use it to me and my coworkers advantage instead of just seing "oh noes" everywhere.
You gotta see opportunity whereas everyone else see hoplessness and competition. Competition is GOOD, it drives us forward, it helps us replace the deadbeats, those who can't see the forest for all the trees!
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This kind of sounds like an admission that you're a hack: not being expert at anything, but always up to date on $current_trend.
The sort of person with 2 year experience in 1,5 year old technology, good at using it, with no idea how it works underneath.
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I really struggled trying to find the point of your message, seems like you focus more on the person than the idea, why tho?
If there's something I've learned from life is that those who claim to be experts in anything, usually ain't.
You're absolutely right that I would happily admit I'm not an expert at anything.
And the thing about that is that it leaves everything open, meaning that I can always learn no matter what I think I know.
Again - I have NO idea what the point of your message to me was.
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Not focusing on you personally, but indeed on the type of person your post reminded me of.
Those pushing for AI adoption today, who were pushing for blockchain adoption 3 years ago, and NFTs 2 years ago. (In my circles, they're the same people...)
This partially coming from my experience with AI helpers, that have been pretty much counterproductive so far. And knowing how AI based stuff is working out in general in our company
> You're absolutely right that I would happily admit I'm not an expert at anythin
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Thanks for your reply, I get where you are coming from now, and it's not very far from how I think either. But our personalities and the way we approach things vary, and that's perfectly fine.
I actually have a background not to far away from yours, at the age of 12 I coded my very first video game, then I went into communications, and all my life I've been working with electronics, everything from constructing hangar remote controls to servicing modules, computers, controllers on a component level, but alwa
The bigger problem is uncurious paycheck seekers (Score:3, Informative)
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I encountered three types. One type that just did the minimum needed to keep their seat, while making sure they were on the offense with office politics. Another type that was doing their best to one-up people so they could climb the ranks, and a third type who was only there to get skills and certs to stick on the ol' CV so they can jump to somewhere else.
Companies need to fundamentally rethink their employee/employer relationship. Turnover affects companies in the long haul, and having employees that a
IRS changed r&d deductions (Score:2)
Rather than amortize developer and engineering salaries during the immediate year, they must be amortized over 5 years. That's a massive financial headwind that companies must reckon with.
If you donâ(TM)t like it, write your elected representatives
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What would be interesting is to have part of it amortized over a longer haul, like 7 years. This way, there is a stake in keeping people around. Perhaps the IRS could give tax breaks for contiguous terms of service, so if someone works there for a long time, their cost to the company with payroll is less.
AI is going to work whatever (Score:2)
Welcome to job commodity status. (Score:2)
Join a Union (Score:2)
You're not going to be able to compete with somebody sitti
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Have fun ordering a computer on your first day of work. Because that's how things would be without IT people to do the shit that other people can't do or won't do.
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Sounds like the problem is bad management at these companies if they can't retain a competent in-house staff.
I'm hiring programmers (Score:5, Interesting)
for our studios in two different countries divided by the Atlantic ocean; job descriptions are practically the same, and pay is slightly above market rates. interviewed roughly 150 people so far since last May, which resulted in 6 hires. vast majority of applicants have 1-2 years of full-time work experience.
so the weird observation is that on the east side candidates are on average better at computer science fundamentals but their command of the engine we're using is often lacking. okay, so they are smart and we can train them a bit on the engine part. guess what, we're very happy with their performance now.
to the west of the pond, however, the candidates are often excellent at the engine knowledge but simple algorithms questions frequently throw a "deer in headlights stare" exception. "I'm going to use Google of course!" (while looking somewhat insulted) occurs at least 20% of the time. "I'm a VR developer, why are you asking this?"... wtf is a VR developer? is that kind of like a piano player who only knows how to use the first three white keys in the second octave? yet someone has hired these people before and paid them money for working with them and not the other way round (ok that was a bit harsh but you get the idea). after all this time, we still have vacancies in that office...
not to sound too arrogant, but maybe, just maybe, the issue is that for many people, actual ability of their skillset to add value to a business is close to zero, and demand for those skillsets is finally now where it should be, instead of crazy as before.
or maybe it's just our sample bias. go figure
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You know, I once did a security code review for a rather critical authorization component for a large bank. What I found on the side ("A doubly nested loop? WTF?") was a, guess what, bubble sort. In Java. Used to remove duplicates from a list. Which was the result of an SQL query. I doubt it gets much worse while still technically doing the job. Of course, this worked with the small test data set (100 entries), but even with the a bit larger test data set (a few 1000 entries), it exceeded the mainframe lim
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You are welcome. It is 100% real. I could not believe it when I found it.
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my company exists for 10+ years and it's been fairly consistently the case that candidates that did not demonstrate good understanding of algorithms would later struggle in the position. and I'm not asking anyone trivia; that would test the candidate's capacity for memorizing such, which isn't really a very useful skill -- I'm asking simple problem solving questions. after all, if someone isn't capable of coming up with a relatively simple algorithm on the spot, are they really a programmer?
the analogy I wo
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Einstein said something similar about getting answers out of a book.
If you don't understand, fine. Please don't bother making me an offer.
It's hitting security already (Score:3)
I've noticed a couple of trends for Security jobs lately.
1) Somehow having 6+ years of python / go development has become a requirement for many jobs that has never required development experience.
2) Around 30% of the jobs are offering 120k or less compensation for Senior Security Engineer roles.
3) CISSP seems to be in high demand.
4) Azure is becoming more popular than AWS and GCP experience is the least desired.
5) More companies are pushing for a move back into the office. The few hiring managers I've spoken with regarding this were set on having people in the office 2-3 days a week and were unaccepting of different hybrid time schedule like 1 week a month.
The future is pretty screwed.
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I've noticed a couple of trends for Security jobs lately.
1) Somehow having 6+ years of python / go development has become a requirement for many jobs that has never required development experience.
2) Around 30% of the jobs are offering 120k or less compensation for Senior Security Engineer roles.
3) CISSP seems to be in high demand.
4) Azure is becoming more popular than AWS and GCP experience is the least desired.
5) More companies are pushing for a move back into the office. The few hiring managers I've spoken with regarding this were set on having people in the office 2-3 days a week and were unaccepting of different hybrid time schedule like 1 week a month.
The future is pretty screwed.
That likely has little to do with the future and everything to do with pulling one over on the U.S. government. They're probably deliberately offering less than a reasonable wage in an attempt to undermine and manipulate the H-1B process. That way, when they can't find anybody willing to take the role, then can get permission to hire someone from overseas for less-than-market wages, because hey, look! Everybody is paying that amount for this specific job title!
Mostly a result of bad HR (Score:5, Interesting)
good (Score:5, Interesting)
Good. The field has been swamped for a long time by plenty of ambitious incapable people who depend on libraries and Internet searches to make up for their inability. And they all turn out bloated code. Buggy bloated code. And don't get me started on offshore imported labor whose work I've had to destroy and do over rather fix. And don't get me started on all the people who lie big time on their resume then can't compile a turd without cheating. There's a certain culture coming from shit universities that it's high time to to flush.
Let all these people flip burgers or go peddle Indian street food out of a truck. The world will be better off.
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ambitious incapable people
I like it! Pretty much spot-on. These are people that produce negative value. Usually only "management" is allowed to do that, but somehow in the software field it is all too common.
AI is magic (Score:4, Informative)
AI, like magic, seems all powerful until you realize what it actually is. Things that have been called AI in my lifetime: Web browser cookies, personal navigation devices, NPCs in Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Republicans, and glorified cruise control.
Turned out that those things turned out to be web browser cookies, varying versions of a game theory engine, barely an attempt at branch logic, fascist shitbags attempting to give us Nazi America about a century after fascism went out of fashion, and sticking a camera on a servo as inputs on the barely an attempt at branch logic stuffed in a car and hoping for the best.
Re: (Score:2)
Game AI has always been called game AI, and that's a perfectly reasonable name for it.
Tetris, breakout, games like that don't have AI, the world responds in a very deterministic way.
Games that have NPC enemies, well they need to respond a bit like a human. Ideally you'd have a human, but no one's going to pay for a thousand human to play the imps in a doom level. So you need some artifice to stand in for human intelligence well enough that the game will play. If only there was a term for this artifice to gi
Re: (Score:2)
If only there was a term for this artifice to give intelligent seeming behaviour...
A logic tree.
Re: (Score:2)
A logic tree is one of the many techniques in use. I have an old book on AI, and it describes a variety of algorithms, like A* search, branch and bound strategies, some optimization, fuzzy logic, and a few other bits and bobs. No one anywhere in the book is pretending this makes code some sort of human replacement general intelligence.
It's a book about replacing things that you may have needed human intelligence for with automation that's good enough.
In other words, artifical intelligence.
Re: AI is magic (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
OK, so you have a general understanding of what AI should be, which isn't hard for geeks like you and me.
But you do get what AI implies for normal people, and why championing it blindly (or cluelessly enough that it appears to be blind) is a completely shitty take, right?
We're really beyond the point of no return on this, either you bought into "no really hiding wipers behind five touchscreen menus and/or a wetness sensor is way better than a muscle-memory wiper switch location" mentality as a moron would a
My Interviews (Score:5, Funny)
"What makes you think you can be a programmer here?"
"That question would matter if you could afford me."
"Do you have any relevant experience?"
"You wouldn't recognize relevant experience if it attached itself to your face and implanted an egg."
"Do you have a recent resume?"
"I don't have the time to train you to understand it."
"I'm a senior hiring manager."
"I have e-mail older than you."
"You don't sound like much of a team player."
"Say hi to your wife and my kids."
Re: My Interviews (Score:4, Funny)
So...which one were you?
Not about AI (Score:2)
250 job applications, 6 interviews (Score:4, Interesting)
I too started a job search in the last year, when my former employer, a mortgage company, cut everyone's pay by 20%. I don't recall how many jobs I applied to, but it probably was a couple hundred. (I did limit myself to just the "quick apply" kinds of jobs, I wasn't about to go through pages of applications just for the possibility of landing on someone's stack of resumes.) I had actual interviews with 4-5 companies before finding a good match.
So this guy's experience doesn't seem that far off to me, nor does it seem unusually difficult compared to past job searches.
AI & Industrialization of IT (Score:2)
This is not a surprise for anyone paying attention. The party is over, the digital frontier is gone, everything is mapped out and the jobs remaining usually are about cleaning up old legacy messes or bringing the clueless up to speed and doing damage control. AI will only get better from here on out and even the toolkits and frameworks have become so efficient that is often easier to build entire setups from scratch using the new stuff rather than messing around with 20 year old software that has become un
Do thousands say its getting much better? (Score:2)
Horses for courses - perhaps it depends what software discipline you are best versed in, for roles where that counts a lot.
I would imagine data science has a good deal of openings and likely with a considerably high barre for entry, so perhaps start to skill up in that field.
The way I see it is that we have a shortage of Software Engineers as opposed to Developers.
Candidates who have been through the mill, fought the battles and come out the other side with the kind of experience that you can only gain the
Crises & interest rates (Score:4, Interesting)
*Which weren't very wisely implemented & ended up mostly making the richest few even richer & further destabilising our economies. Additionally, newer jobs have been lower paid & more precarious than ever, which also further destabilises economies.
Time to pivot (Score:5, Insightful)
huh ? (Score:2)
Did they underestimate the AI implications ?